


Naught But Silence

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 12 Days of Carnivale, Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Dismemberment, Gen, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, do you think hickey died too quickly? then this is the fic 4 u
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 03:31:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17052293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: In the wake of the carnage, a dying Hickey meets Lady Silence for a final time.





	Naught But Silence

**Author's Note:**

> For the 12 Days of Carnivale prompt "fire and ice."
> 
>  **ADDITIONAL WARNING** for a brief imaginary/metaphorical scenario involving insects crawling around inside someone's (Hickey's) body, which I wasn't sure how to tag but which I'm _preeeetty sure_ deserves a specific heads-up.

They're fire and ice, the two of them, as different as could be. And yet the Tuunbaq had wanted neither of them.

What the fuck _had_ it wanted, Hickey wonders. He'd thought he'd known. He'd thought _he'd_ be wanted. For once, he was sure, he'd be chosen. He'd be exalted.

He wants to ask her why, why, _why_ had he been cast aside, as _she_ had, but of course he's sawed out his tongue, the afterimage of the act bright and cold where the steel had passed through the squirming muscle. And even had he not, she likely wouldn't even understand him, anyhow.

He watches her approach. The thing about all these rocks, all this uninterrupted, sweeping _space,_ is that people can be seen coming from very far away. His eyeline's cut down, seeing as he's stuck lying aground, but even so. Even so, there she is. Trudging ever closer, dragging her quaint little sled. She's round and gray and brown in all those furs, an indomitable little lump of a thing, with her pigtailed head poking out from the top like a stubborn peg which has somehow gone without being hammered down.

She's blurry, too. But that could be him. His vision swimming with agony and exhaustion and bitter, bitter betrayal.

His stomach aches something awful. Must've been that Goodsir he ate, even now bucking against the order of things, trying to buck his way back up Hickey's throat. Curse the man. Curse him and curse whatever curse he laid upon Hickey to cause him to sicken in this way.

It's still easier to focus on the stabbing hurt of his stomach than it is to focus on the girl, or on the reason he's confined to the ground.

His legs are gone. One below the knee, the other above. Ripped off by the Tuunbaq as easy as a child tearing the legs off a wet paper doll.

The arm's gone, too, having gone with his tongue, with the beast's first bite. He's down three limbs. Like a common freak or a beggar from the gutter. One of those many miserable sots whose pathetic supplications he'd dodged around as a young thing, when he was bright and whole and keen and clever and he'd still thought he could claw his way out. When he'd still thought he'd make something special of himself.

Look what he's made of himself now.

The girl kneels before the hulking body of the Tuunbaq and leans in as if for a kiss; probably to check whether the thing is truly dead. He can't quite see what she does, but then she leans back again, and her expression is one of flat, unsurprised sorrow. She takes her waterskin and dribbles some water into her hand, and from there pours it into the bestial mouth, to the slack, crooked underhang of its terrible jaw, with its terrible, eerily humanlike teeth. As if she could wash the sour taste of blood and bile and poison from its tongue.

She damn well takes her time in getting up again. Paces around Crozier, first, where he's sprawled headless, brains and gore spilling out in a lumpy bloom from the stub of his neck, the mess punctuated by shards of shattered skull as pale as the rocks. Curved and creamy like broken eggshell. She looks away soon enough, mouth twisting in grief, and surveys the other corpses. All the mismatched bits of men strewn across the Godforsaken stones, and not another one of them who was a friend to her.

She blinks when she sees that Hickey's eyes are open, and that he is watching her. He sees her expression subtly and swiftly purge itself of all sorrow, hardening, becoming a mask as impenetrable as the pack ice which had swept up the ships.

 _Is_ she the ice? Or the fire? She has the chill of it, which he fancies he has, also. Patient losers, the two of them. Perhaps that is what the Tuunbaq so disliked. Perhaps he's delirious by now.

He hopes she can see the hellflames in his eyes. He's feverish with it. He'd burn her, if he could, scorch her like he'd seared Goodsir's flesh on the stove, nice and rare and red, and maybe he'd finally learn what she sounded like when she screamed, but he can barely do anything now. Nothing other than breathe and bleed, really. Breathe, bleed, and watch Lady Silence.

Her Silent Ladyship comes and kneels before him, further away from him than she was from the bear. More wary of him than of that monster. Both maneaters, but only Hickey is yet alive; and even so, he will not be for long.

He grins at her, for he knows it must be a ghastly sight. Blood in his teeth and down his chin, his beard painted with a splattered slaughterhouse streak. Malice overflowing from his eyes. He dearly wants to see her flinch.

She does not. It takes more than a grinning, dying cripple to rattle her, after everything.

He wants to remind her of when she was frightened of him, remind her how he'd tied that rope around her wrists and delivered her as a present to a man who would not appreciate it. He doesn't know how to do that without words, and the wordlessness is killing him as sure as his wounds are. The things unsaid are boiling up in him. A swarm of trapped locusts. Pressure in a corked bottle.

Has _he_ cracked?

The locusts are feeding on his stomach, his spleen and kidneys, all the soft organs. Sweetmeats invaded by spiky carapaces. Spiny legs and shearing alien mouths and the thrum of many wings.

He coughs at the buzz of the wings in his throat, expecting the scourge to belch from his mouth, a great, biblical cloud. There are only a few flecks of blood and a howling emptiness in the cavern of his mouth. The place where his tongue should be.

The severed root has clotted somewhat, or, just as likely, he's bled out far enough that there simply isn't much blood left to bleed; makeshift tourniquets put together with one hand only do so much. He can't really taste the blood, at least, but it is thick and slimy down his throat, and cloyingly metallic at the base of his nose. He coughs again, clears his throat noisily. It is difficult not to choke.

The soft shush of fur and movement redirects his attention. Lady Silence has taken out her waterskin again, and is taking a drink.

Hickey is suddenly aware of how parched he is. He's more thirsty than he can ever recall being. Strangled with it.

Blood and bile and poison. He'd do anything to wash it away. To clean his tortured insides with a sip of cool, fresh water. Anything to even lick his dry, cracked lips in anticipation.

He clicks his teeth and gentles his smile into something lovely and charming, and shows this to her as the waterskin lowers. He lets her see how he flicks his eyes to the water, and makes them pleasant and pleading when he flicks them back.

He is helpless. He's a harmless, wanting thing, and this is all he wants. She could spare some for the dead monster, after all. Surely she will spare some for him.

The dull dawn sky is slowly spinning around and around, Lady Silence poised and unmoving in the center. She watches him.

He could peel the flesh from those high cheekbones of hers. Take off her infuriating face until her molars were stripped bare, like pearls glistening among pink and scarlet. He could butcher her easy. Not as much meat on her as a man, but she'd have something more than nothing.

He wants to tell her that he butchered her beloved Goodsir easy. The moral man who followed her like a protective lovesick puppy. There'd been fondness there between them, care in how he'd arrived from _Erebus_ with her to _Terror,_ and with how he'd ushered her away from the food line with its cans of tainted meat, his hand brushing polite and familiar against her arm. Maybe she'll go back to the camp and see what Hickey's done to her darling Goodsir for herself. Maybe that would hurt her enough for her to cry, seeing as her seeing Crozier didn't do it.

He wants to make her cry. Wants to tell her he saw the Tuunbaq spook from her, when she spoke to it. When they'd each still had their tongues and Hickey still thought that Crozier saw something in him. He knew she'd fail even before he thought that he would be the one to succeed. He'd seen her for what she was. For the useless thing she was.

He's naught but a useless thing too.

And he can tell her none of this. He can't even beg her for her mercy.

Hickey pleads to her with his eyes, instead, grinding his teeth together and feeling the lack of everything he wants to snarl at her, and she watches him with that mask of hers in place in return. The edges of Hickey's sight are blotting out, going as dark as Lady Silence's gaze.

She moves the waterskin out between them and his heart leaps with hope.

Then she tips it and pours a mouthful of water to the rocks. Wetting the pale dust to beige, the shale echoing with it, sloshing into the cracks and disappearing with a glass-crackle rush.

He cannot roll close enough to get to it in time. The stone is gritty beneath his lips, and he sucks in not a drop.

He screams with his face to the ground, and then cackles, flopping his head to the side to watch Lady Silence rise to her feet and take her leave. He laughs and laughs, throwing it after her calm, retreating back until she fades into the distance, and until he fades away, too.

 

 


End file.
